Qaeda's Terror Chef is Running Out of Recipes

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Qaeda's Terror Chef is Running Out of Recipes

It's hard to pick a favorite feature out of the well of Inspire, the English-language magazine published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But the "AQ Chef" might be tops: like a jihadi Martha Stewart, he gives practical advice for the homegrown, middle-American terrorist to develop into a real mass murderer. Only his recipes in the new issue show a certain lack of panache.

Over the weekend, the Yemen-based branch of al-Qaeda released the fourth issue of its English-language magazine, which launched in July. (You can download it from this somehow-not-removed Facebook page. ... and the page is now down, Facebook emailed Danger Room a few hours after this post went up.) The previous edition was devoted to bragging extensively about the $4200 October plot to blow up cargo aircraft with bombs packed in printer cartridges, a 21-page gloat session so interminable you could forget that the plot failed. (But just barely.) What would the AQ Chef come up with to top that?

Not much. His "Open Source Jihad" column this time around is devoted to blowing up a building – at first glance, an impressive terrorist spectacle. Only the same guy who came up with tricking out a Ford F-150 with blades in the grill is phoning it in.

First, the AQ Chef doesn't distinguish between commercial skyscrapers and apartment blocks, which are going to be made out of different materials, with skyscrapers less vulnerable to low-level detonations. And that's what the Chef is cooking up: his major piece of advice is to "rent an apartment in the lower floors," saturate the apartment with gas, and ignite. "If two corners of a building are struck, the building – by the will of Allah – will come tumbling down."

Or there'll be a big fireball that sets the block of flats ablaze but won't tumble it down. The best part of the tip? "Try to have the explosion appear as an accident." But wait – don't you want to take credit for it as a blow to the infidels?

Nowhere does the Chef devote attention to case studies of prior terror attacks that didn't succeed in bringing down buildings, like the explosives-filled truck that couldn't topple the World Trade Center in 1993, to explain what went wrong. Instead, there's a Wikipedia-level discussion of the basics of how to make stuff explode. You'll be shocked to learn that it takes oxygen, a fuel source and ignition. And you'll be aghast to learn that all structures are vulnerable at their centers of gravity.

That's some impressive laziness. The internet is filled with information on concocting explosives and engineering sites relevant to controlled detonation. (You can Google on your own, thanks.) Nor are there many other how-to tips in the latest Inspire. The other major tip? A diagram of the different parts of an AK-47. And if you're interested in learning about the ubiquitous rifle, you'd be better off reading C.J. Chivers' book on its history, excerpted in WIRED.

There are even some instructions for submitting content to Inspire. ("If you are able to translate from Arabic to English, please send us a sample of one of your translated works. Include the Arabic along with the translation.") You just can't rely on your own staffers to generate material anymore.

The whole point of Inspire is to brainwash disaffected American Muslim youth into becoming terrorists, giving them practical guidance so they can pull off murderous mayhem without doing something that attracts the attention of spies or cops (like, say, traveling to Yemen or Pakistan). Past issues have seen the AQ Chef teaching kids how to "make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom" or shoot up the lunchtime crowd at a sandwich shop. If flooding an apartment with gas is the best he can offer after only four issues, maybe the head of the National Counterterrorism Center is right to warn that we're needlessly portraying terrorists as ten-feet tall masters of destruction.